Spray Paint Can

How do you stop graffiti? Call it art.

Many people think “graffiti” is the opposite of “clean,” and after July’s massive gangster tagger attack besmirching about a mile of Skinner Avenue, you can’t exactly blame them. On the other hand, last month, the Broadway Graffiti Garages, three open parking bays bedecked or bedizened with hip-hop-style murals for years, won the Weekly Volcano’s Best of Tacoma readers’ poll for Best Public Art. Tacoma is at the forefront of the Northwest attempt to solve the graffiti problem – and mitigate its underlying social problems – through artistic instruction, via the city’s Safe and Clean Team. “The idea is to combat vandalism through media-based art,” says City of Tacoma arts administrator Amy McBride, “to reclaim walls hit by [inartistic] graffiti; to show there are other ways to show ownership of the walls.”

Photography by Aaron Locke. This graffitti was captured inside the same garages, for our cover story on graffiti back in March 2007. Read it in the archives.

The Graffiti Garages constitute ground zero of the Tacoma graffiti experiment. The building itself is such an eyesore that practically anything you do there is good. But some citizens objected. The difference between inspired street art and philistine gangster tags is a matter of taste. And some knuckleheads have viewed the art as a personal challenge and defaced it.

“I was all Pollyanna about it,” confesses McBride, “but people do vandalize it. I hear people say, ‘This thing is sanctioned by the Man, so it can’t be real art!’ So they try to mess it up. So it gets closed down.” A graffiti unbeliever complained, and in 2008 the city ordered the owner to paint over the messed-up Graffiti Garage artworks. “That broke my heart,” says McBride. “The world’s a rough place.”

The graffiti world is also rife with ironies. A property owner tries to do the right thing aesthetically and socially, permits sanctioned graffiti, and winds up ordered to pay for ugly rollover paint obliterating it. Or the city may require the removal of blackberry bushes that previously hid wall space. “You have to rip ’em off, so the wall gets tagged, and you get charged for repainting it,” says McBride. “You can’t win.”

But this year McBride got the city to permit a Safe and Clean version of the Graffiti Garages, with help from Fab-5, the Tacoma group that leads the region in hip-hop art education. Last month, the City of Redmond, home of Microsoft, hired Fab-5 to run its Graff 101 class, which turns kids into graffiti Rembrandts in three days flat. “It is an art form,” says Graff 101 administrator Chris Cullen. Grads exhibit their work at the Redmond Skate Park’s free graffiti wall.

“We had a huge graffiti problem in the early ’90s,” says Redmond police spokesman Jim Bove. “One of our officers, Bill Corson, went to the kids and said, ‘What can we do to help you stop painting on the city?’” They got a place to paint at the skate park. “In 1993, our numbers dropped, like, overnight,” says Bove. Instead of sixty complaints a month, they got twenty. “Now we average four per month, which is practically nothing compared to the issues we had prior to the wall.”  The key, says Bove, is to fight destructive graffiti by training actual artists. “It wasn’t telling kids, ‘No! Go away.’ It was, ‘Come here and do it right.’ Everyone needs a place to express themselves.”

The re-graffitied Garages seem to be working well. “Bands want to play there,” says McBride. “From my window, I see people there, college classes, photographers. They’re buying sandwiches and coffee – they’re an economic engine.” But she’s not Pollyannaish about the murals anymore. “When people tag them, I’ll be devastated.” •